Finding a Good Neighbourhood in Ottawa

We’ll try to point you towards good neighbourhoods, ranging from rural right into the heart of the city.

Clearing snow from a suburban street in OttawaSnowblowers are better than shovels

Farther out is best for lower crime, larger lots and cheaper real estate prices.

Nearer downtown is better for cultural activities, short commutes, and a more active nightlife.

We’ve organised these pages using the highest rated public secondary schools as a starting point for finding good places to live.

Not everyone is comfortable ranking schools by academic performance, including many people who work in education.

In the absence of any other measure, however, we’ll use rankings from the Fraser Institute to identify Ottawa’s best performing public schools and their neighbourhoods.

If you have children of the right age, these areas will probably be important to you. Even if you don’t have children of the right age, areas around good schools are often among the best to live anyway.

We also try to pick the lowest crime areas, but please don’t get too obsessive about crime. Ottawa is one of the safest cities in Canada/North America.

Having said that, Ottawa does suffer typical city problems, such as drug abuse and gang activity, albeit on a smaller scale than most. You are unlikely to have any issues in Ottawa if you exercise common sense.

Here are our Ottawa rural/suburban picks

Click a red marker to learn more about any of the areas we’ve picked

Types of dwelling in Ottawa

Almost 70% of dwellings in Ottawa are houses.

The remaining 30% are mostly condominium apartments.

Just over 60% of Ottawa’s houses are detached; the rest are row houses and semi-detached.

Prices

According to Royal LePage (2016) the price of a two-storey townhouse in Ottawa averaged $420,000 in 2016, while bungalows averaged $389,000 and condominium apartments averaged $312,000.

According to the Ottawa Real Estate Board (2016) the price of a house averaged $390,000 in mid 2016, while condominiums averaged $272,000.

When we give average house prices below, they’re the average for all houses; the average detached house will be more expensive.

Favourite Neighbourhoods

Here are our own favourite Ottawa neighbourhoods. If we’ve not included your personal favourite, we’re sorry.

Ottawa has many great places to live, and we’ve done our best to select some of the best.

If you haven’t visited Ottawa before, you could use these as starting points when you search for a place to live.

1. West Carleton-March

West Carleton-March is in Ottawa’s far west. It’s a rural area, made up of scattered small villages and communities. Its total population is about 23,000.

Here, within a short distance of the nation’s capital, you can pursue the Canadian dream of owning a large house with plenty of space around you.

West Carleton-March has the lowest crime rate in Ottawa.

It also has one of the city’s best secondary schools, West Carleton Secondary School, which is rated very highly by the Fraser Institute, both for its raw academic results and for ‘adding value,’ achieving better results than expected.

If you’ll be working in Kanata, West Carleton-March is an easy drive.

If you’re working in downtown Ottawa, West Carleton-March is less convenient. It’s about a 30 to 60 minute drive in normal traffic, depending where you live, but at rush hour you could add about 25 minutes or so to your commute time.

Bus travel from West Carleton-March to downtown isn’t possible – you would need to drive to Kanata first and take a bus from there.

Expect to pay about $370,000 for an average house.

2. Kanata North

View Larger MapEnjoy a virtual drive along March Road, Kanata, home to a large number of businesses.

Kanata North is a family oriented suburban area with a population of about 35,000. It lies just south of West Carleton-March.

Kanata North has one of Ottawa’s fastest growing populations, growing by 30 percent between the censuses of 2006 and 2011, with a large number of new homes built.

Crime rates are a little higher than West Carleton-March, but are still comfortably below Ottawa’s average.

In addition to the Research Park, a large number of businesses, such as Research in Motion and Alcatel-Lucent are also located in Kanata North. You can see some of them by taking a virtual drive along March Road in the Google Streetview on the right.

The Centrum Shopping Centre is a large shopping area with cinemas and plenty of large, free parking lots.

Ottawa’s National Hockey League team, the Senators, is based in Kanata North.

Driving downtown in rush hour will take about 50 minutes; the bus journey takes a similar time.

● English language elementary and secondary schools are available in Gatineau. BUT a parent must have attended a Canadian school where English was the language of instruction for their children to qualify for an English school.

● All other children go to French schools, unless their parents opt for private education in Ottawa. The high cost of private education more than absorbs any financial advantage Gatineau might have.

● If your long-term future lies in the Ottawa area, having your children speak French fluently will make it easier for them to get government jobs in a city that is officially bilingual.

● Aylmer, population 41,000, is an area of Gatineau favoured by Anglophones. Aylmer looks across the Ottawa river into Ottawa. English is the mother-tongue of about a third of the people in Aylmer – and nearly everyone understands English. The west side of Aylmer is particularly Anglophone.

● Aylmer has public schools catering for English speaking children who qualify.

● If your priority is for your children to attend the highest academically rated English speaking schools, your best option is probably to live in Ottawa, rather than Gatineau.

● A commute from Aylmer to downtown Ottawa will probably take you about 30 minutes or so – the bridges over the river are bottlenecks at rush hour.

● In the unlikely event that Quebec ever becomes an independent country, living in Gatineau and working in Canada might be less straightforward than it is today.